Children Of 2 Lands In Search Of Home

By LISA BELKIN

Published: May 19, 1988

Growing up in Vietnam, Vinh Doan came to expect rejection. His father was a black American soldier whom he never met. His Vietnamese mother spent years telling him he was ugly because he looked like his father, then gave him to a neighbor when he was 7 years old.

When he came to the United States two years ago, he says, he thought he would finally belong. He was wrong. ''In Vietnam they called me American,'' the 19-year-old explained through a translator. ''Here they don't know what I am.'' Outcasts in Two Lands

Mr. Vinh's story of hope and disappointment is typical of the disillusionment of nearly 5,000 Amerasian children and their families who have entered the United States over the past 10 years. And it is what faces more than 20,000 more Vietnamese children of American fathers who are expected to arrive in the next 18 months.

''Most of these children have spent their whole lives being discriminated against in Vietnam because they are Americans,'' said Anna Crosslin, executive director of the International Institute of Metropolitan St. Louis. ''Now they come here and people say, 'You don't look American. You don't sound American.' ''

The rejection is all the more devastating because ''the Amerasians think of this as their country, this is their father's country,'' said Rose Marie Battisti, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees in Utica, N.Y., which has settled 360 Amerasians and their families since 1983.

The adjustment problems of Amerasian immigrants have suddenly become a matter of concern to officials and social workers who must prepare for the immigration flood that is expected to result from the Amerasian Homecoming Act. The legislation, passed by Congress last March, marked the end of the tight controls the Vietnamese Government has placed on Amerasian emigration in the last decade. Problems Rooted in Chaos

The immigrants will be sent to one of 30 cluster sites around the country, which have not yet been chosen by the State Department but which are likely to include Houston, St. Louis, Utica and Washington.

In deference to the sensitivities of the Vietnamese Government, the Amerasians will not be called refugees, but the new law makes them eligible for benefits normally available only to those with refugee status.

If the Amerasians already here are any guide, those about to come will need help with more than housing and getting a job. Many will bring problems rooted in the chaos of Vietnam, where their black and Caucasian skin branded them as the enemy. There are accounts of Amerasian children being abandoned on the streets of Saigon, forming gangs to help care for each other and turning to prostitution and theft.

Nearly every child has a story like that of Nguyen Yen, 16, whose hazel eyes and peach skin drew the wrath of a third grade teacher who had fought on the side of the Viet Cong. He repeatedly told her, ''Go back to your country, go back to your country, go back to your country,'' said Miss Yen, who moved to the United States four years ago, first to Atlanta and later to Houston. 'I Am Very Ugly'

This expectation of hatred is hard to shake, the Amerasians say. And it is but one of many differences between Amerasians and other immigrants from Vietnam. Having been taught to fear her Vietnamese teacher, Miss Yen said she was at first afraid of her American teachers, too. It took a particularly patient tutor, a woman named Linda who spoke to Miss Yen for hours even when she didn't respond, to teach her the excellent English she speaks today.

Mr. Vinh, by contrast, has still not recovered from being taunted by his classmates or being abandoned by his mother because he was black. ''He looks at me and says, 'Maybe my mother was right, I am very ugly,' '' said Ngo Tuy-An, a social worker with the Houston Y.M.C.A., which has sponsored about a dozen Amerasians and their families since 1983 and hopes to sponsor 10 times that number by the end of 1989. ''He cries easily,'' she said. ''He acts like a tough guy to hide everything he feels.''

Because the Amerasian children are second-class citizens in Vietnam, they are often kept out of school altogether there. Arriving here as barely literate teen-agers, they start from scratch in classrooms with children half their age.

Hoang Tran is 14 years old and is repeating third grade for the fourth time. Earlier this year he dropped out of school and ran away for two months. He has recently agreed to move back home, but only if his mother, Sam Tran, does not force him to go to class. Harder to Be a Mother

''He thinks he's so big he should be with the big friends,'' Mrs. Sam said. ''But his English isn't good enough for higher grades. He thinks he's American and that makes him angry.''

Thinking they are American and being treated like foreigners is a problem not just for the children, but for the non-Amerasian family members who have to deal with their rage.

''The first day they come to the United States they say 'I am American now, I do want I want,' '' said Ly Thi Sau. Her daughter, Phuong Khong, 21, had a white American father and her son, Khong Thao, had a black American father. ''It is harder to be a mother here,'' she said. ''In Vietnam my children listened.''

Her daughter, Miss Phuong, said through a translator that she and her brother always felt like outcasts, even within their own family. She moved out of the family's tiny apartment two days after arriving in Houston to live with an uncle who had immigrated years earlier. Soon after, she moved into her own furnished.

She said she realizes she is causing her mother pain. But she said: ''There is no other way. I am different. I am part American. Because I feel different I had to move out.'' The Search for a Father

Her brother's rebellion was even more dramatic; more than once he stormed from the apartment in a rage and threatened the neighbors with knives, his mother said.

Meeting fathers is on many an Amerasian child's list of dreams that America can't fulfill.

Mrs. Sau said her two Amerasian children might find part of the sense of identity they lack if they could meet their fathers. But she believes Miss Phuong's father was killed in battle and she does not remember Mr. Thao's father's name.

Before he left Vietnam with his adopted family, Mr. Vinh's mother showed him a picture of his father, a faded snapshot she had hidden from the Communists for nearly two decades. She wrote the man's name on a slip of paper, and asked her son to find him. But, Mr. Vinh said, ''she told me to wait until I was somebody.''

Mr. Vinh decided that being ''somebody'' meant owning a car, and he saved his paychecks as an onion slicer in a local restaurant. But now that he holds title to a faded green 1979 Chevrolet he does not know where to start on his search. He lost the piece of paper with his father's name and he has forgotten what it said. Letters to his mother during the past two years have gone unanswered.